• DOI:10.1007/BF00172565
• Corpus ID: 118280333

Using Mokken scale analysis to develop unidimensional scales

@article{Gillespie1987UsingMS,
  title={Using Mokken scale analysis to develop unidimensional scales},
  author={Michael W. Gillespie and Elisabeth M. Tenvergert and Johannes Kingma},
  journal={Quality and Quantity},
  year={1987},
  volume={21},
  pages={393-408}
}

• Michael W. Gillespie, E. Tenvergert, J. Kingma
• Published 1 December 1987
• Psychology
• Quality and Quantity

This paper describes Mokken scale analysis as a method for assessing the unidimensionality of a set of items. As a nonparametric stochastic version of Guttman scale analysis, the Mokken model provides a useful starting point in scale construction since it does not impose severe restrictions on the functional form of the item trace lines. It requires only that the item trace lines are monotonically increasing and that they do not cross. After describing the Mokken method, we illustrate it by analyzing six abortion items from the 1975–1984 NORC General Social Surveys. In contrast to earlier parametric analyses of these items (regular and probit factor analyses), we find that these items form a single dimension. We argue that the two-dimension solution of these earlier analyses is an artifact of the differences in the difficulty of the items.